HIS 8 - Bog Bodies: Windeby Girl

A short article by the Archaeological Institute of America. Was Windeby Girl a female after all?

Windeby I is a bog body that was discovered in a peat bog located in the town of Windeby, near Schleswig, in the northern part of Germany. This bog body was discovered in the middle of the 20th century when peat from a bog was being cut by locals.

Initially, the bog body was dubbed as the ‘Windeby Girl’, as it was believed that the body belonged to a 14-year-old female. In more recent times, however, this designation has been re-assessed, and it is now agreed that these are in fact the mummified remains of a male individual.

Discovered in northern Germany in 1952, experts thought that Windeby Girl may have been an adulteress whose head was shaved, after which she was blindfolded and drowned in the bog. However, “the theory unraveled after Heather Gill-Robinson of North Dakota State University took a close look at the body … Windeby Girl was likely a young man” and may have lost his hair when archaeologists’ trowels dug up the body.